Mobile Workstation: Dell Precision M90 Notebook Review. Page 10

Michael Dell must be pleased with his engineers and designers who have succeeded in creating one of the first mobile workstations capable of running resource-consuming professional 3D applications. The Dell Precision M90 is a perfect tool for people who work in such areas as digital animation, special effects, video editing, CAD and modeling. More details in our article!

SYSMark 2004 SE is intended to reveal a system’s performance under different types of load. It simulates a user who is solving practical tasks in a few popular applications. Multi-threading is taken into account. The benchmark issues a few ratings that are indicative of the system performance under different loads. SYSMark 2004 SE is mainly positioned as a tool for testing desktop systems and includes applications that are not often run on mobile computers. That’s why the results for each test load are shown separately:

The 3D Creation script simulates a user who is rendering an image into a BMP-file in 3ds max 5.1 and is also working on web-pages in Dreamweaver MX. After these operations are over, a 3D animation is created in a vector graphics format.

This test needs a fast CPU, and it’s natural that the notebook with a higher CPU clock rate is ahead here. When working on the batteries, the notebooks deliver nearly identical results as their CPU clock rates get lowered to the same level in power-saving mode.

The 2D Creation script simulates a user creating a video out of a few RAW-format fragments and a few audio tracks in Premier 6.5. Waiting for the operation to complete, the user is also modifying an image in Photoshop 7.01 and then saves it on the disk. When the video clip is ready, the user edits it and adds special effects in After Effects 5.5.

This test, and some of the following ones, produces roughly the same results as the first test. We guess there is no need for any comments here.

The next test simulates the work routines of a professional web-master. The user unzips the content of a website while using Flash MX to open an exported 3D vector graphics clip. Then the user modifies it by including more pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The resulting clip with special effects is compressed with Windows Media Encoder 9 to be broadcast via the Internet. Next, the website is compiled in Dreamweaver MX while the system is being scanned for viruses with VirusScan 7.0 in the background.

It’s similar to the previous test. The Dell Precision M90 is slower when working on the battery due to its slower system configuration.

The next script simulates an ordinary user who’s receiving a letter with a .zip attachment in Outlook 2002. While the received files are being scanned for viruses with VirusScan 7.0, the user looks through his e-mail, enters some comments into the Outlook calendar, and then opens a corporate website and some documents with Internet Explorer 6.0.

The CPU frequency is not a decisive factor for this script, so we don’t see the twofold performance reduction on switching to the batteries.

In the Document Creation script the user is editing text in Word 2002 and is also using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to convert an audio file into a text document. This text document is then converted into PDF format with Acrobat 5.0.5. And finally, the document is employed in a PowerPower 2002 presentation.

The test is again sensitive to the CPU frequency and the results are lowered just as the CPU frequency is when the notebooks work on the batteries.

The final script from SYSMark 2004 SE includes the following: the user opens a database in Access 2002 and creates a few queries. Documents are archived with WinZip 8.1. The results of the queries are exported into Excel 2002 and are used to construct a diagram.